Betamax

However, by 1981, United States' Betamax sales had dipped to only 25-percent of all sales. citation There was debate between experts over the cause of Betamax's loss.

VHS vs. Betamax main Size comparison between Betamax (top) and VHS (bottom) videocassettes.

It might be time for everyone to go though their betamax collection.

There is even a betamax of me running down a hallway literally giggling and pooping as I run naked.

As competition came from Sony 's Betamax and the VHS group of manufacturers, Philips introduced the N1700 system which allowed double-length recording.

Betamax's major advantages were its smaller cassette size, higher video quality, and earlier availability but its shorter recording time proved to be a major shortcoming.

Betamax's smaller-sized cassette limited the size of the reel of tape, and could not compete with VHS's two-hour capability by extending the tape length.

However, the sticking point for both consumers and potential licensing partners of Betamax was the total recording time.

In 1975, it released the first Betamax home video recorder, a year before VHS format came out.

Matsushita also regarded Betamax's one-hour recording time limit as a disadvantage.

MESECAM (home recording) MESECAM is a method of recording SECAM color signals onto VHS or Betamax video tape.

Sony eventually released an extended Beta cassette (Beta III) which allowed NTSC Betamax to break the two-hour limit, but by then VHS had already won the format battle.

Sony's Betamax competed with VHS throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s (see Videotape format war ).

Sony's release of its Betamax unit to the Japanese market in 1975 placed further pressure on the MITI to side with the company.

The heterodyne color-under process of U-Matic, Betamax & VHS lent itself to minor modification of VCR players to accommodate NTSC format cassettes.

The NTSC 4.43 system, while not a broadcast format, appears most often as a playback function of PAL cassette format VCRs, beginning with the Sony 3/4" U-Matic format and then following onto Betamax and VHS format machines.

This format competed with Sony's Digital Betacam in the professional and broadcast market, although in that area Sony's Betacam family ruled supreme, in contrast to the outcome of the VHS/Betamax domestic format war.

This reduced Betamax's once-superior video quality to worse than VHS when comparing two-hour recording.

United States fair use law, as interpreted in the decision over Betamax ( Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios ), dictates that consumers are fully within their legal rights to copy videos they own.

VHS was the winner of a protracted and somewhat bitter format war during the late 1970s and early 1980s against Sony's Betamax format as well as other formats of the time.